Google is streamlining its artificial intelligence (AI) research divisions by merging them into one unit called Google DeepMind. This move will include the teams from both Google Brain and DeepMind, which will now work together to develop and deliver AI research and products.
According to Demis Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, Google DeepMind will collaborate closely with other Google product areas to create the next generation of AI breakthroughs and products. Google will also create a scientific board to oversee research progress and direction for the unit, led by Koray Kavukcuoglu, the VP of research at DeepMind.
Eli Collins, VP of product at Google Research, will join Google DeepMind as VP of product, while Zoubin Ghahramani, the lead for Google Brain, will become a member of the research leadership team, reporting to Kavukcuoglu.
The goal of this new unit is to bring together the talent in AI at Google and the computing power, infrastructure, and resources of Google and Alphabet to create groundbreaking breakthroughs in a responsible way. Hassabis believes that the work they will do as part of this new combined unit will lead to the next wave of world-changing breakthroughs.
Google bought DeepMind, co-founded by Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman, in 2014 for $500 million. Since then, the lab has made headlines with its AI, including defeating human professional Go players and predicting the structures of complex proteins. Google Brain was established in 2011 as a part-time research collaboration between Google fellow Jeff Dean, Google researcher Greg Corrado, and Stanford University professor Andrew Ng. It has developed tools such as TensorFlow, an AI model creation framework, and improvements to Google Translate.
By consolidating its AI research divisions, Google aims to stay at the forefront of AI research and development with other tech giants.
